Visions of a Better Life
A Critical Perspective on Our Lives, and a Way We Can Seek to Improve Them in Community
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Notes and Disclaimers
To see a note on positionality, read here.
In this piece, I am writing from a highly critical perspective, as a method for identifying the ways in which our lives need improving, so that we can then improve our lives. I am not, however, in a negative state of mind about who we are, because we are all just such beautiful, well-meaning creatures and I love us. But in this writing I will not be highlighting all the wonderful little things we do. Maybe another time.
I am also writing in a way which is inclusive, saying “we”. I do this intentionally, but I know that ultimately I only speak for myself. My rhetorical approach I hope will allow for a process whereby the reader questions whether or not they are a part of these experiences I am describing. But I want to make it clear that I know that I am ultimately speaking from my personal perspective, and expect that my analysis might be very off the mark at times. Please tell me if you think it is.
Also, I want to say that I know my ideas are not new or original. Additionally, they are all just opinions based off my very limited view of things, constrained by all my limitations, whether that be limits in perceptiveness, cognition, sensitivity, articulateness or otherwise.
Intro
In this document I will:
Explain how I see my life and the life of my peers, and how we relate to ourselves, each other, and our broader community of human and non-human entities.
Offer a path which could improve our lives and relationships. I will write about this in terms of a community I want to help create.
I write this because:
I want to get down some broad ideas for myself, which helps me to clarify my values and goals in life.
I want to find people who align with my vision, so that we may work together on creating community.
I want to find people who don’t align with my vision, so that I may hear what they have to say, and either change my vision, or keep my vision as it is, with knowledge that we don’t align.
Who are WE?
We are westerners who have become aware of the evil of our own society, but still constantly contribute to and benefit from its evil ways.
1. The Current State of Things
As non-marginal members of Western society, we are all materially rich. There is a gradient to this wealth, and someone living paycheck to paycheck is different than someone with a trust fund, but even many living paycheck to paycheck in rich western nations enjoy massive privileges when compared to those who are poor on a global scale, living in countries who continue to be at the economic mercy of rich western nations. I wrote a bit more about this here so I’m not going to expand on this point more.
We enjoy various levels of luxury, whether that be flying across the world for vacation, taking a spa-day, or turning on our central AC when the temperature inside causes slight discomfort.
Money doesn’t buy happiness, and moreover, happiness does not equate to a deep sense of well-being. Our privilege often does not make us happier, and even if we can leverage our privilege for momentary pleasure, we do so while wounding ourselves psychically, spiritually, and physically.
This is because we know that our privilege is built on a rapacious economic and cultural model which has dominated the world for centuries and continues to do so. We are aware that our privilege is built on genocide of millions of indigenous people around the world, that it enslaves, that it obliterates non-human species, that it always prioritizes economic growth at the cost of ethics, etc. We are aware of this, and it violates our ethics, and our spiritual knowledge, so our participation in it causes a deep pain. Though we may benefit materially from this system, we are deprived of many other things which are necessary to a good and healthy life. Our system does not provide and indeed discourages community connection, meaningful work, connection to land, spiritual health, healthy food, connection to body, etc.
We all cope in whatever ways we can, often throwing ourselves into one or multiple aspects of these things, carving out little spaces where we can weather the storm of our alienation. Many of us dedicate ourselves (usually at the cost of our own well being) to working for the betterment of others who are under more intense pressure than ourselves by our system. We might carve out meditation practices, we go to therapy, we love our friends, our partners, our dogs. We make art. Many of us are on SSRI’s. Some drink alcohol. We all make our own cocktail of coping mechanisms. We are resilient and we do sometimes find better paths. Balance is hard to attain but a rare few beat the odds and find something close to real balance, though often that might come after years of alienation to get to that point.
In this writing, I want to describe one path that I hope to walk with my friends, in the hopes of improving our lives, our community and our world. But first, I want to get more into the state of things, by category. These categories are all interconnected.
Personal Economy
The infrastructure of our daily lives is unethical. In almost every facet of our lives, overuse of resources and waste are essential. I wrote more about that here, so won’t go into too much detail. But that fact creates a deep problem at the heart of our lives. Everywhere we turn, the best ethical choice available is to do something to slightly lessen our evil. Constantly acting immorally is unavoidable as long as we remain a normal part of the economy.
Work
We want to work. We want do something with our time, something meaningful, something we understand, something which feels good, which contributes to the well-being of ourselves, others, and the earth.
We work. Most of us work a lot, indeed, most of our waking hours are spent working. Yet, most of us are unfulfilled with our work. Our lack of fulfillment can come from various places.
One issue is when our work misaligns with our ethics. We might find ourselves caught working in systems which we know perpetuate our unethical growth-obsessed economy. Or we might just work jobs which are mostly ethically neutral, which simply have little connection with our ethics.
Another issue is that our work has too much separation from our personal lives. Even that sentence making sense to a western reader shows how impersonal our work has become. We must choose between nurturing our close personal relationships or nurturing our work. Or at least we must balance the two, which remain in opposition, rather than in harmony. Notably, we find our work lives at odds with caring for our children and our elders. Our solution to this problem is to send our kids and elders into the care of strangers. Our children are then raised by others, and our elders die in the care of others. We miss out on some of the most mutually enriching and connective experiences of our lives, and entrust them to people whose labor is likely being exploited by the systems we find so unjust. We miss out on wisdom that our children and elders possess. And they miss out on all we have to offer them.
Additionally, our work lives can become places where our personal problems have no place, meaning at work we must dismiss our pain, our joys, our humanity in service of an impersonal work space. Work is not a place where the point is to build important and deep relationships, and often that type of connection is discouraged. Our social lives are usually organic and flexible, and our work remains rigid. Fitting them together involves painful contortion.
Similarly, our work disconnects us from our homes. We must go elsewhere to work, leaving our homes empty and unattended. Again our work exists in opposition to the nurturing of our home space, as we try to balance the two. During work hours, our idle time is often spent in liminal spaces in which we have no investment. Often these workspaces are impersonal. We spend too much time in places which have nothing to do with ourselves, our roots, our community. Wholesome domestic tasks like cooking and cleaning are often given to someone else to do, in their own alienated wage-labor. Spiritual connection is lost.
For some, work disconnects us from our bodies. Many of us have work that does not involve much movement, and often we are looking at screens, typing words, or becoming disembodied heads on the screens of others. All those hours spent in this way takes a heavy toll.
For many, work disconnects us from the land. Our work involves synthetic materials, often manipulated inside, in air-conditioned spaces. We don’t feel the wind, the sun, the earth, nor do we hear the birds, or smell the flowers. We are separate from those things.
Some of us are over-utilized, in that our work asks too much of our abilities. Others are underutilized. Gatekeeping, lack of flexibility, and the unethical/unspiritual nature of our economy lead many of us into jobs which do not ask much of us. We are all special and beautiful creatures. How many of us are being asked by our work to be special and beautiful?
Home
I have said above that our work alienates us from our home space. But other aspects of our society do so as well. Many of us rent our homes, which can contribute to that alienation. We are not in control of our spaces, and the final say about them is dependent on landlords who often rent the space for purely economic reasons. The space that cultivates our most beautiful experiences is often owned by someone who only sees our experiences as useful to their own economic end. This is deeply painful. It encourages us to disconnect from the infrastructure that constantly surrounds us, and to not invest ourselves as deeply in our spaces or our immediate spatial communities of neighbors, roommates, etc.
Even if we don’t rent, many of us are out of touch with our homes. I have mentioned how work contributes to this, but additionally our culture does not encourage a self-empowered relationship to home. We are all capable of not only fixing and maintaining our homes, but even building them. We feel that these things are beyond us, and are intimidated by them. We assume the only way to power our homes, to draw water from the earth, is through massive unethical corporations or corrupt state organizations. But we have that power ourselves! We can intimately know and create our homes, harnessing the resources necessary to live simple wholesome lives. And in doing so, we can take better care of ourselves and our community. And we can feel connected to our space.
Relationships
It is a testament to our resiliency that many of us have some wonderful relationships. Many of us, however have none or very few. Even those with lots of deep intimate relationships tend to be lacking a sense of cohesion, a community.
We are all under cultural pressure to conform to a way of relating which probably serves very few of us, maybe none. That is, the nuclear family. As kids we may enjoy deep connections with friends and family (nuclear and extended) alike, but as we age we are pushed more towards a small and isolated intimate circle. Some of us obtain “success” within this model, which means having one intimate romantic partner with whom you live and raise a couple of kids. You then are supposed to stay together and romantically exclusive forever, waiting for the kids to leave you for their new partners, and hopefully give you grandkids to come over and occasionally babysit.
We who “succeed” in this system often suffocate within it. Disconnected from community support, we are encouraged to labor extensively for the financial security of our families. We hand off the care of our kids to others while we labor. Our labor, and the time we spend caring for our household, leaves no time for nurturing our relationships, often with ourselves, our partners, our friends, or anyone else. We drown. Often we buy more stuff or services as a quick fix to our problems. This drives the economy. It doesn’t really fill our emptiness.
Some of us try to succeed in the nuclear family model and “fail”. Some of our identities don’t fit that model which is based on heterosexual cis-gendered monogamy. Some of us try to fit in only to find ourselves alone at the end of the day. Intimacy can be very hard to find and build in our society. Because we are so individualized, because our work is impersonal, because our homes are separate and private, old relationships can be hard to maintain and new relationships can be hard to reach. Where and how can we make these new relationships? It’s hard out here!
Some of us manage to nurture a web of intimate relationships. This is rare and takes a lot of work. Because we are geographically spread out, this can also take a lot of resources.
Even those of us who have a rich social life say that we lack community. Our society is anti-community. Our work, our homes, our monogamous myths, our consumptive addictions, hold us back from being together. And we need to be together. We suffer because we lack a sense of belonging, and because we are poorly supported. We expect impersonal organizations like the state or businesses to care about us, to take care of us, but we must take care of each other. And we don’t. We are uncomfortable with community, because we are private individuals, chained to our private lives. But we are aching for community.
We have a hard time asking for help. And some of us have a hard time giving it. We are under too much strain to give help. And our society says its a failure to receive it, unless it is within your nuclear family. We need to create the space and culture in which care can abundantly flow. Where people can give, knowing they are held by others, and can receive knowing that receiving creates intimacy and trust.
Self
Many of us are not taking good care of ourselves. We neglect and forget our bodies. Our food systems are unethical and unhealthy. We can’t or don’t know how to nourish our bodies. We don’t rest when necessary. We don’t sleep enough. We blame ourselves for our misery. Many of us are mentally ill, often turning to medication as the only viable option to try to be well. We feel powerless. We are stuck. We sell ourselves short. We barely know ourselves.
Some of us are too self-indulgent. Rather than neglect ourselves, we use our privilege to obsess over ourselves. This can be good for knowing ourselves better, but as we feel our wider community suffering, it creates tension that is hard to bear. We must find balance.
We are unguided spiritually. Most of us reject religion, as it has so often conspired on the side of our evil society. We are culturally disjointed and disconnected from our ancestors, and have little clear and good guidance to follow from trusted personal sources. So, we are spiritually at sea, searching for books and podcasts, often just watching internet videos which claim wisdom. But discernment is hard without proper guidance. We are often mislead.
Land
We are disconnected from the land. Many of us are settlers, only arrived on the land we live in the last couple hundred years, often much less, so we inherit very little wisdom about the land.
Germophobic, hypersterile, we shudder away from dirt and bugs. We are alienated from nature. We don’t know the plants, we don’t know the water. We rely on others for information about it, but that does not suffice for real experience of the earth and the plants and the animals. We are ignorant and this ignorance makes it easier to be violent against the Earth.
And we are constantly violent against the Earth. Caught in our system which benefits and grows from constant waste and destruction, much of our daily decision making involves trying to lessen the violence we wage on the precious Earth. It feels inescapable, and we just hope our violence is relatively low.
Many of us eat meat, some of us eat a lot of meat. This involves the slaughtering of animals at great energetic expense to the Earth. But how many of us could kill the animals we are eating? This is part of our alienation and numbness, which keeps us from feeling anything fully. If we numb ourselves to so much, we cannot unnumb to those more pleasurable and fulfilling experiences. So we are left wanting.
Transportation
We rely heavily on high-speed travel which we use indiscriminately. We are desensitized to the intensity of our choice to move at such high speeds all the time. The choice involves the use of a massive amount of energy that comes at a dear cost to our precious Earth, as well as our fellow humans. We also numb ourselves to the pure intensity of the experience of moving so fast and so loud, getting used to the idea of flying through space in our own personal giant metal machine. We put ourselves and other beings in great danger in our massive speed machines, but most of us are not sensitive to this, because if we were, we couldn’t drive anywhere, and we are addicted to driving.
All of this takes a toll. Some of us drive in a tense state, on the brink of rage if someone else does something unsafe. In general, our choice to move at high speeds constantly contributes to our numb and dissonant state, which brings us further from peace and truth.
Wider Community
Some of us dedicate ourselves to serving our wider community through our work. We often do this at great personal cost, and have much less to offer our personal lives. Such work usually leaves little space for creating a personal lifestyle which is consistent with those ethical goals that we pursue at work. This creates distress. We drive 5 miles to work at environmental non profits, come home to our single family home which uses coal to constantly keep the temperature inside perfectly comfortable. We know our lifestyle is using more than its fair share of resources, but what can we do? We are exhausted from our work.
And many of us neither have work nor personal lifestyles which support the health of our wider community. We live on the spoils of western empire and do nothing but contribute to it. To cope we can do nothing but ignore our wider community. We cannot stomach that we can have so much and others can have so little. Numbness and blindness is the only option.
Consumptive Vices
We are prolific consumers. Our society needs us to consume and so we do, constantly. Home products, sporting goods, toys, beauty products, tools, TV shows, music, instagram posts, gas in our cars, alcohol, and lots of food. We consume and we consume and we consume. It is beyond immoderate, it is exorbitant. It is how we cope. We know how to find pleasure in consuming and so we do it, and with that pleasure we attempt to fill the massive holes in our being.
Consuming drives our rapacious economy. It creates value in otherwise value-less things which allows our economy to grow. This makes us (though mostly the 1%) richer and richer.
And It also saps us of our creative potential. Always taking and taking, we forget how to give, we forget how to use our own power. Some of us would rather watch fictional people on a screen live than live ourselves. Or at least that is what we choose to do. Real connection has proven too difficult in our society, but consumption is the easiest possible thing.
We over-use toxic things like alcohol and social media. All things could be ok in moderation but these drugs are addicting and have intense negative effects on our souls and bodies.
And we do so compulsively, against our intentions and our ethics. We are slaves to our consumptive habits. This fuels our feeling of powerlessness. We need to break free.
Politics
Many of us are disillusioned politically. We follow politics mostly as passive consumers, the news just being another form of twisted entertainment. We may learn about things happening in the political sphere and talk about them, maybe some of us give money to a candidate, and most of us vote, but for the most part we are politically inactive. Our votes are are usually between the lesser of two evils.
All of us entrust the fate of the world to others, those “powerful” people, like famous politicians, celebrities, or big business CEO’s. We hand over power to the state or to the market economy, thinking all we can do is complain about what is not being delivered to us. But we can deliver what we need to ourselves, and thus, we can take political power into our own hands. Additionally, we can create groups amongst ourselves, of personal connections, which go beyond hot-button issues, and are based on love and care of each other. Thus, we can create a group with deep political power and collective agency.
2. A Different Path
My vision for us is to live together as a multi-generational community. We would live together on land that we would nurture together, bringing forth whatever resources we needed from the land that it could sustainably provide. We would live very simply, ridding our lives of things we don’t need, and bringing our personal economies to a place which aligned with our ethics. This would mean a lot of hard work, and so our work would largely go into these wholesome simple activities, connecting us to our bodies, the land, and each other in the process. We would build a resilient and kind culture which would grow wise through its own bold experiments with mutual care and support. We would care for our elders and our children collectively, and they would in turn impart their wisdom. Our community would aim to serve the wider community, and remain open to it throughout our journey together. Hopefully, much of our work would be for the betterment and connection of that wider community. Together we would arrive constantly at an imperfect destination, always striving for more alignment and balance, coming closer to the truth, but never reaching it. In doing so, our lives will be well spent and we will be our best selves.
I want to point out some particular ideas I have about this vision.
Place
We need to create our community in a place which allows freedom from the evil system but also connection to our wider community. The obvious place for this seems to be in a rural place with ready access (ideally not just by car) to a place with a larger web of people (probably a city or town).
Growing all of our own food will mean we will need at least some farm land. We will also likely want as much sunlight as possible for solar-based energy infrastructure.
Very likely we will be settling in a place from which indigenous people were violently forced out, land on which they were victims of genocide at the hands of western empire. There will likely be people alive today that have ancient memory and knowledge of the place on which we will settle. We will have to approach the land with humility and respect, as well as be respectful and humble before those people who have the connection to that land. We will aim to heal collectively in that place.
On a personal note, I will be likely working to create this space close to loved ones, which means most likely either in Virginia or Quebec.
Personal Economy
We will dedicate ourselves to a personal lifestyle which is ethical and maintains good relationships with ourselves, each other, our environment and the wider community.
This means we will remove ourselves as much as possible from the violent unethical economy. We will do this mostly by consuming much much less than we are used to consuming. We will use less energy, less water, less material stuff. We will strive to have no waste in our system. And we will strive to have lives that are not violent to the Earth.
We will also put into place infrastructure that allows us to use resources sustainably and modestly. This includes building/renovating our homes and workplaces to be comfortable while using energy at maximum efficiency. It also includes growing most or all of the food we eat, thus shortening the distance it must travel and aligning the methods of growing that food with our ethics.
Much of my inspiration for the infrastructural side of this comes from the model being played out at Living Energy Farm in Louisa, VA. They have managed to grow almost all their own food, grow seeds for their business, and sustain their home lives, 95% fossil fuel free. And this is all off-grid, so it is not dependent on coal fired power plants or hydroelectric dams which have destroyed ecosystems. It also does not heavily rely on wood burning. I hope to go into more detail about their model and how I see its implementation in our community in another post.
Work
The work we do will bring us closer to the land, each other, our bodies, and our homes. Our work will be in service of our values and/or in direct service of basic sustenance. So none of our work will be unethical or alienating. Work will be integrated into home and personal life as much as is needed to create balance, and will be flexible and personal in its nature.
Work might not always be easy, but we will all find work within our community that resonates deeply so that even the hardest tasks are a pleasure.
Agriculture
We will aim to grow all of our own food. Depending on where our community is this could be more or less difficult. But in striving for this goal, we can certainly produce most of our own food. We will do this in a way that cares for the soil and the surrounding ecology, and can be done for generations to come. This will be a large part of our work. In doing this work, we will seek to learn all there is to know about doing it well, and in the process we will become experts at it, and will share our knowledge with others.
In addition to improving our relationship with the Earth, we will also be improving our health. We will gain access to the healthy food which is either impossible to get in our society or else is prohibitively expensive.
Since we will have a farm, it is possible we could feed others outside of the community, and this could be part of a business which allows the community to remain economically viable. Thats not essential but it is a reasonable option.
We could also grow non-food plants, of course. Medicinal plants, for example, could work well with our goals of care.
Care
We will be there for each other. Service to each other will be a pleasure we always seek, and will be given and received in total abundance. We will learn the best practices for care, and become experts in care. Much of our work will be in service to each other. We will care for our kids and each others kids, and we will care for our elders.
Since we will have such abundant capacity for care, we might be able to provide care as a service. This could mean that children or elders or others in need can come to us for care. Maybe we could provide birth care, death care, abortion care, nursing, social work, etc. This could be a part of our economic model.
Diversity
I am writing this with my perceived peer-group in mind, because I feel that is my space in which to speak, but our community will not be limited to that group. Our community will benefit from as much diversity of background as possible. Diverse backgrounds of age, class, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, language, religion, etc. will improve our wisdom, resiliency, and ability to connect to a wider community.
Diversity of opinion will also be essential. We will need all of our minds to work together from different angles to tackle problems. And tolerating difference while working together is a magic we must learn. That being said, we must have core values in common, without which we will be lost.
Spirit
We will strive to heal our spirits, and to bring ourselves closer to deep truths about ourselves and our world. Most clearly this healing will happen in our mundane lives, as we draw closer to each other, the land, and our ethics. But we may also find other ways to reach truth together, may it be in reading, art, ritual, religion, or otherwise.
Relationships
Our relationships will be our highest priority. We will be accepting of all forms of consenting, mutually beneficial relationships, and celebrate them without bias towards any particular model of relating. We will develop good relations with ourselves, each other, the land, and the wider community.
Love will be practiced continually in an active sense. We won’t aim to control or possess one another, but will try to care and be cared for, always learning what loving another means, and how it can deepen our connections. Love may not be our constant feeling but it will be our constant practice.
Transportation
We will be sensitive to the massive input of energy, as well as psychic toll that high speed transportation takes, and weigh this in the balance of necessary work and connection that must be supported my movement, in the constraints of time-governed life. In working through this balance, we will likely travel less and at lower speeds than we do now, and will often choose to take high speed transportation which has a smaller net use of resources and commits less violence against our world and ourselves.
Some Questions and Answers
How can we remove ourselves enough from an unjust and evil system, while not isolating ourselves from our wider community?
I don’t know. There is a tension here. The more we involve ourselves in service of society, the more we become caught in its web of destruction. We can only just try our best to find a balance between those things.
What about our need for novelty and movement? Will we suffocate if our social, work, and home lives all happen together in one place?
I don’t know. It does seem necessary to allow for movement through space. Many cultures of our ancestors moved around a lot. It is a trait of our current society to settle in one place, and perhaps it is ill-fitting. I do think we are overly accustomed to a certain type of novelty, and many of us would thrive if we let ourselves sink deeply into something. Connection with the wider community and opportunities for ethical travel seem helpful for those of us who might be restless.
Your community vision might be all well and good, but it’s easier said than done! Buying a house in the country sounds lovely, but how can I pay for that? How could we actually do this?
To this I say: Where there’s a will there’s a way. And this is particularly true in community. We all have our piece to offer, and together anything is possible.
Conclusion
I could probably keep adding to this document, and maybe will, but I am eager to share it in the hopes of receiving critical feedback. Despite the tendencies of my personality to want to be celebrated as amazing for everything I do, I am presenting this document with all the humility I can muster, because I do so in the service and in the pursuit of truth. And so, I must know, how do you relate to what I am writing? What questions, problems, conflicts come to mind? Do you see yourself in this? Why or why not? I share this just as much to know you as for you to know me. I beg you to be in earnest conversation with me.
Thank you for reading. <3
-Bubby Soup aka Joseph